Installing Linux on a USB? Consider This.

I'm thinking about just storing libraries, packages and settings in the external ssd. Any other file on the cloud, with end to end encryption.

I still have my first flash drive, a 64 Mb. It is at least 15 years old and still works.

Cheap SATA SSD + USB3 adapter IMO

I'm daily driving Mint on a flash drive as an experiment to see how long it lasts. I still think simple thumb drives have a massive advantage for their portable form factor and physical durability. I'll just work with the assumption that the drive is going to wear out eventually, and not keep sole copies of important data on it. To me, the use case of it is to have a portable os with software and files I need that I can run on almost any computer I have access to without affecting that computer.

There are a couple measures I'm taking to reduce wear. All the drives in my fstab have the "noatime" option set. This makes it so the file access time isn't updated when the files are accessed which is a huge source of a bunch of small writes. /var/log, /tmp, and the firefox cache2 folder are mounted as tmpfs since those are all temporary files that get changed a lot. (some guides might also tell you to do this to /var/tmp, but official documentation says that folder's for files that need to be preserved across reboots). I use btrfs as the rootfs with the "ssd_spread" and "compress=zstd" options set. ssd_spread spreads files out across the drive in an attempt to level the wear to the drive. Compression can reduce wear and speed up filesystem access by reducing the amount of data that needs to be read and written.

Thank you for your feedback. is there any video you recommend how to prepare an external Linux drive ?

Yes, it happened to me. I have a Samsung Plus Fit 256GB flash drive, a very fast one, which got worn out after like 6 months. I became simply too slow. I think it was because of EXT4. Now I used the same flash drive but with F2FS, as it makes apparently like 70% less read/writes. Do you think it should help? Hopefully it will...

In this day and age? An ssd will outlast a hdd. If you lug that HDD around with you, it will get bumped and banged around all the time, HDDs are very sensitive to this. SSDs have no moving parts, so no shock weakness. Moreover, modern ssds have in excess of 3-400 TBW, that is YEARS of lifetime. I have an ssd from 2015 chugging in a lab, its only reached 60% of its rated TBW.

thank you

I’ve been trying to do an install of Linux on an external ssd but it wants to mess with my windows boot sector on the machine’s internal ssd. Are you just using the iso version on the usb stick and calling that the Linux installation?

Maybe I missed it, but
stating average r/w
cycles & speed of a
SSD vs a FD vs a HD
would be good info.

Wow thanks for the tips dude, never knew flash drive tends to be slowing down in the long run, i thought flash drive is better choice than hard drive because it's a flash storage and don't have moving parts, thank you

What is Persistence Volume.....how do u enable it... never heard of it!!!
.

HELP!!! After seeing your Video I want to install Linux Mint Cinnamon on my 700 GB EXTERNAL HD, and, then remove it from the other 3 PCs.....then take the 700GB external HD and use it with either Windows 10, 7 or the XP PC. Will it automatically boot to Linux and still give me the Dual Mode Screen option?

Excellent, cheers from Canada.

I got an 125 GB SanDisk with 3.2 Gen 1. And I tryed it, you can work easy with that speed. I forgot to try the Gaming part, but games use more Ram, CPU, Gpu

AH--- that's why my VENTOY started putting out distros with a LOT of issues!!!!!

This has been one of the best video i keep coming back to... even after all this year's, finally going to do a usb installation. I was wondering if one can instal linux on the world's smallest hdd

or you can buy an external HDD case and several small harddrives, install various distros on them, and just use your computer's drive for storage. My computer is super swift but has an SSD. I have a spare but I wouldn't rely on either of them.

You can get small hard drives 3 or 10 or even a dozen at a time and with a usb hub with power switches for each port, a D-Ban stick, a SpinRite stick and a Supergrub2 stick, just in case, you could use them with either very little or no work at all on just about any computer

I used a 256 gigs sandisk drive for a full installation of ubuntu and now its fried

Would you ever do a video on editing a Linux live cd ISO to add some customizations or even your own distro? Just a thought but what about a "Switched to Linux" distro?

Depending on the use case and personal preference a better option (for me at least) was to remove the wifi card which freed up an M2 Sata port. Put a secondary M2 Sata hard drive in there. Then just use an external WIFI USB adapter (which are smaller than most thumb drives so it actually doesn't look bad).

You should not assume that everyone knows what you mean when you use euphemisms. Case in point I have never heard the term "spinning rust" . I assume you mean a HDD.

Surely youre much better off getting a Samsung T7 SSD? For a 500gb SSD it only costs £67, it will have much higher read and write speeds than the HDD, and you wont have to worry as much about it being knocked and just breaking. Plus SSDs tend to last quite a long time, hence why they are used in computers where they are constantly read from and written to. A HDD would be much cheaper for the amount of storage you get, so if you really need a lot of storage that might be a better option.

Decent SSDs that last a long time arnt nearly as expensive as they were many years back, and most people would be happy with the 500gb since you're just using it externally. I wouldnt spend too much on an SSD youre planning to use just to constantly etch different OS to, or save some programs, photos, videos etc to and from unless you think you will be using it that much.

My laptop doesn't boot from internal drive. I have changed multiple drives, but nothing. It boots from usb connection, no problem at all. Tested openbsd install on a usb drive, works great. Let's see how long it lasts.

I'm using a cheap USB 2.0 drive and get decent enough speeds for a bootable drive! Of course, all my hardware is low end, so patience is a virtue lmao. mkusb seems to take the cake so far in terms of performance with a persistent Lubuntu install.

With a full install to USB (not live boot with persistent storage, but disconnecting the system hdd and installing to USB via Lubuntu live boot) I'm even able to do a full update and upgrade, install Steam, and even play some lesser resource intensive indie games with it! But it seems performance might be taking a hit in contrast to the mkusb persistent install.

I don't know too much about linux.
Is it okay to use Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon from a 30Gb persistence volume I created on my phone using droiddrive? I just wanted to use mostly for video chats I have OBS, and droid cam set up so basically my phone is the webcam/mic/OS... , It actually works better than my windows 11 on the SSD on the same computer. I use mostly firefox and set it up to cache in RAM everything seems to work fine. I also didn't want the drivers to be just for this computer.
But wasn't sure if it would be best to install it to the volume or keep persistence.

I did so much with computers that I dont even like computers anymore lol.

Its not limited read write cycles, its just usb longevity or life cycle. All electronics have one.. Ive used some a decade and still no problem, some a year and they go bad. Different reasons, its electronics. Same with platter hard drives. Same with ssd's. All electronics like even your tv can have a guessed life cycle based on components and usage. Another example is the theoretical limit of shutter clicks for a camera. Yes you can find that one in its specs. There is no read write cycle limit per say, its more the longevity of the chip, and then longevity of the unit with all components. Some electronics will give you this estimate. Major factor is heat, shortens chip life, ever noticed how RAM memory heats up when tested. Or heat can come from surrounding components. Another major factor is power surges.

Hi! Is there speed tests of using External USB Flash drive vs External SSD vs External HDD for use as main boot drive? Not live CD.

When creating a full install USB boot drive with manually created partitions, a lot of questions and decisions are required that are not obvious to a "non expert". Things like recommended partitions - perhaps - boot partition only - system partition - home partition - share with DOS partition. Decisions involve what type of file format, mount points, boot files like grub, boot loaders and perhaps others that are not commonly understood. Then I take the distro defaults, sometimes I end up with a bootable USB drive. When I try to manually partition, I ... well so far never, end up with a bootable drive. Any chance for a create bootable USB with manually created partitions video? Thanks.

can i use 2 or myb even more distros in one flash drive or ssd , hdd ?

Outstanding work.

I only have one thing I would add. I too favour spinning disks in some cases. There isn't a perfect answer re SSD read/write limits. But THE one reason why in a portable drive I would make consideration on drive choice - is this. If I am carrying a drive around in my backpack/ruck sack - and I assume some shock/transit risk - I move away from spindle to SSD external. The SSD is not wholly immune to G shock or poor treatment, but it doesn't have the fundamental G shock limits of a mechanical drive.

If its a drive sat on shelf and in lab only usage (for example) - the larger cap, better cost, and frankly less wear limited spindle drive can have a place. As ever, this falls into best tool for the job basis of consideration.

Thanks for the great video.

I run LINUX from a flash drive but it is a read-only ISO written to the drive,which simulates a CD-ROM, so I don't have the read/write problem.

You should do a video on the Ventoy utility. I just ran across this and found it SO helpful. It basicly turns a usb into a housing for multiple iso install images. so great to have one flash drive to rule them all.

There's a preferred file system type for an external Linux install?

Personally, I would probably go for a USB4 or thunderbolt external NVME enclosue. They tend to be a lot smaller, and if I want this pocket operating system, I'm likely to be carrying and moving it around quite a bit, so I'm not sure how much I would trust HDDs.

Do use M2 SSDs in an enclosure
Many of them have an USB plug 🔌

I do the opposite. I have Linux on my PCs internal SSDs and Windows on a USB SSD. That way Windows is ONLY on my system when booting from USB. performance surprisingly isn’t too shabby.

I do the opposite. I have Linux on my PCs internal SSDs and Windows on a USB SSD. That way Windows is ONLY on my system when booting from USB. performance surprisingly isn’t too shabby.

I do the opposite. I have Linux on my PCs internal SSDs and Windows on a USB SSD. That way Windows is ONLY on my system when booting from USB. performance surprisingly isn’t too shabby.

Just use Ventoy and change ISOs.

bummer; I've failed .. seems my Controller4 isn't old enough to have nor recognise either A USB nor a SATA HD! .. so, now what??? .. I mean, I couldn't even find A Tablet on line that could use either of those either! . as for Booting an ISO, those are assigned to Web Addresses - free to all.
. out of curiosity, what Year or Century are you working out of?

I have been a Gentoo Linux user since 2003 and I think everybody already knows that when you update or install packages in Gentoo, that it compiles each one from scratch and that, in turn, leads to a lot more reading from and writing to storage media.

On my my home systems running Gentoo (my philosophy with computers is lots of "old cr*p", especially Thinkpads, rather than one or two computers with the latest hardware), I always use a small and cheap SSD (usually 120GB) for the main Gentoo OS and, if there's the space in the machine, a second mechanical drive for general file storage. So far I have had one failure in an SSD in my living room media PC, and that SSD was probably 3-4 years old.

One thing that the Gentoo developers do recommend is to use tmpfs to do all of the compilation in RAM which not only speeds up compilation but also dramatically reduces reads and writes to storage - the downside of that is that to compile a big package like gcc requires at least 2GB of tmpfs, which may be a restriction on older computers.

But tmpfs might be a good solution for those worried about excessive storage media wear.

Regarding lifespan, would an NVMe stick in a USB enclosure have the same lifespan as traditional USB SSDs? And also how would I multi-boot an external USB SSD? Say I wanted 4 or 5 different versions of Linux, pfSense, Proxmox on a stick and wanted to try various flavors from time to time.… how to do? What kind of boot manager?

You are absolutely right, it will last forever, just so long as you do not drop it. 🙃However, it will not be particularly fast, overall.

Hah! I posted a comment that was deleted by YT I guess- I described using a USB3-MSATA metal enclosure for 8 bucks from China and a Kingston 256G MSATA SSD for 40 bucks from Amaz...I did put the URLs on the comment, so mebbe that's why YT did not post it(or removed it).

I’ve also found that the EXT3/4 file system doesn’t beat the crap out of your external HDD. So the USB limitations don’t really show up.

In my experience when an Hdd fails it's usually the mechanical parts like spindle that you can replace and save your data. SSD or USB you just wondering why it's empty until you realize it is definitely the correct drive, but it's empty.

I use a live usb to install linux. The only time I actually use the usb is initial install. I keep it around in case of crash. To plug in usb and retire data from crashed system.

Hey Tom,
Could you perhaps do a tutorial on how to install Linux on an external hdd?
Thanks.